Constant plasma crashes after post install "zypper dup" to Packman

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Yesterday I did an online upgrade from 13.2, everything looked more or less okay save for a few little things. Then I added “All of Packman” and other repos and did “zypper dup” again. There was more than a hundred packages to install and all vendor changes went to Packman. Then, a few hours later, after a reboot and watching videos for a couple of hours (with Smplayer, if it matters), plasma started crashing and restarting every few seconds.

Here’s a paste of one of these plasmashell crashes.

Plasma had become so unusable that I had to install xfce and then lxqt for good measure. They work without problems. I love me some xfce but mostly as a fall back option, and after Plasma5 I can’t look at anything else.

Another issue is crashing kdialog which I can reproduce from xfce, too. Even when Dolphin asks for confirmations it causes a crash and it’s reported as “knotify4”. Here’s a paste of one of those.

Personally, I suspect a sound problem, it’s one of those areas where Packman packages can interfere with what is needed by Plasma, right? I’ve read horror stories about phonon and gstreamer here but it could be something else, too. Perhaps it’s the old Kde4 settings interfering, perhaps it’s one of sound control programs I used in 13.2 to redirect output from hdmi to internal sound card or make them output simultaneously, those programs were pulse audio related, can’t remember their exact names now.

If I create a new user, will some remains of KDE4 make their way into his settings? Can I delete all traces of KDE4 safely?

#2

I see one thing that’s wrong. Your ‘zypper dup’ should have been something like


zypper dup --from Packman\ Repository

where the “” escapes the space char. If you added Packman manually the repo name might be different.

#3

Indeed! I should have forced update from Packman.

This time I did from graphical Yast, there’s an option there to switch packages to selected repository, which I assume is the equivalent.

Five minutes with no crashes so far…, kdialog threw a warning on first try but then it went away:

stan@linux-y70s:~> kdialog --error "test"
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString
,QString)
kbuildsycoca4 running...
stan@linux-y70s:~> kdialog --error "test" 2>/dev/null
stan@linux-y70s:~> kbuildsycoca4 running...
^C
stan@linux-y70s:~> kdialog --error "test"
stan@linux-y70s:~> kdialog --error "test"
stan@linux-y70s:~>

I don’t know what that kbuildsyscoca4 is, I didn’t type it up.

#4

kbuildsycoca4 is the command that (re)creates KDE4’s system configuration cache (sycoca), which e.g. contains all existing menu entries and installed “plugins” to speed up searching for them.

This only needs to be run if you installed new packages or the cache doesn’t exist yet, and is being run automatically when it’s detected that it is outdated.

You can just ignore that message.

#5

Do I really need KDE4 components, cache, settings files etc? Sometimes they look completely out of place.

For example, after logout I’m taken to the login screen from KDE4 and if I click on shutdown menu in the bottom right corner the even older kdm menu pops up. I’d prefer to have Plasma5 instead at least for login. I have Leap 42.1 on a live usb stick and everything there looks nice and consistent, I want to have the same on this machine, too.

#6

If you use KDE4 applications, yes.
And kdialog is a KDE4 application, a KF5 version has not been released yet.

Sometimes they look completely out of place.

You mean KDE4 applications look different than KF5 ones?

For example, after logout I’m taken to the login screen from KDE4 and if I click on shutdown menu in the bottom right corner the even older kdm menu pops up.

The login screen is independent of the desktop.
Choose whatever you want.

You probably still use kdm, Leap’s default is sddm, and that’s recommended by KDE/Plasma5’s developers.
Install that (it probably is anyway), and set it in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager.

Plasma 5 even includes a settings module for it (shows up in “Configure Desktop”/"System Settings), it’s in the package kcm_sddm which should be installed by default as well.

Updates/Upgrades do not change the configured login screen, as that is a user (or administrator) configuration.
Also, you could have more than one desktop installed, e.g. KDE/Plasma5 and GNOME. Which login screen should the system pick in this case?

#7

That fixed it, thanks. There’s no sddm in /etc/sysconfig Displaymanager dropdown menu but it says it can take any value and it took sddm fine.

The login menu “Configure Desktop” was set to default Plasma5 one but the system didn’t respect it. After changing a few settings and clicking apply I was asked for password and now I have plasma login.

Obviously is has to be configured by the user, I just didn’t know where the settings were. Thanks.

Maybe the last thing - I can’t find settings in Dolphin to make files open on double click instead of single click? It used to be there. Dolphin loves to crash on fiddling with settings so I’m afraid to poke there too much. Just now it crashed as soon as selected Configure Dolphin. After restart it worked but double click setting is still elusive.

#8

Actually sddm is used by default on a fresh KDE installation.
But as mentioned, the existing choice won’t be changed if you upgrade, kdm is still included in the distribution.

The default sddm theme should be “breeze” as well, at least if sddm-branding-openSUSE is installed. If you installed sddm-branding-upstream for some reason, the upstream default, “maui” will be used.

Maybe the last thing - I can’t find settings in Dolphin to make files open on double click instead of single click? It used to be there.

Configure Desktop->Input Devices->Mouse, like ever.
Dolphin did contain this setting as well in the KDE4 version, but it has been removed in Dolphin because it affects the whole desktop, not only Dolphin.

Dolphin loves to crash on fiddling with settings so I’m afraid to poke there too much.

Just now it crashed as soon as selected Configure Dolphin.

Probably this bug:
http://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=952460

That crash happens when you click on “Configure Dolphin” while another submenu is still open. So wait until all submenus are closed to avoid it.
A fix will be part of the upcoming KDE Applications 15.12.1 update.

#9

That’s probably https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347917 . You’ve got a newer version of vlc from packman, but packman doesn’t provide a matching phonon-backend-vlc package for that version. Remove phonon-backend-vlc ( you have probably to taboo it, so that it doesn’t come back) and things should work again.

#10

Definitely not.
Leap 42.1 comes with VLC 2.2.1, the same version as Packman, so the included VLC backend should work.

Remove phonon-backend-vlc ( you have probably to taboo it, so that it doesn’t come back) and things should work again.

The backtrace shows that he was using the gstreamer backend anyway.

So if there are still crashes, it might be worth a try to actually install phonon-backend-vlc and phonon4qt5-backend-vlc (the KF5 version).

Or try to remove gstreamer-plugins-vaapi (or maybe it’s called gstreamer-vaapi?), I think that can cause problems too.

It might just have been some incompatible mix of gstreamer packages installed, as the “zypper dup” apparently seems to have fixed it… :wink:

#11

Surely you meant “zypper dup --from Packman\ Repository”? I did it from graphical Yast software manager by selecting view by Repositories and then clicking “Switch system packages to the versions in this repository”. I hope it’s the same thing. In any case, it worked.

I would like to completely delete all of VLC and reinstall it again.

To delete from graphical interface - is it enough to simply search for “vlc” and then delete everything that comes up? Would it leave some packages like “libvlccore” or something? How to remove those?

To install - I understand there are at least three repos providing vlc - non-OSS, Packman, and dedicated VLC repo. Which one to choose and how to force vlc to be installed from non-OSS, for example, and not from Packman and vice versa?

#12

Of course I meant that. I was just too lazy to retype all that again, and didn’t see a need as you ran it already anyway…

I would like to completely delete all of VLC and reinstall it again.

And why?
That’s not how you normally fix things in Linux, and it’s working now anyway, no?

To delete from graphical interface - is it enough to simply search for “vlc” and then delete everything that comes up? Would it leave some packages like “libvlccore” or something? How to remove those?

libvlccore will show up too, if you search for vlc… :wink:

To install - I understand there are at least three repos providing vlc - non-OSS, Packman, and dedicated VLC repo. Which one to choose and how to force vlc to be installed from non-OSS, for example, and not from Packman and vice versa?

Never mix VideoLAN (the “dedicated VLC repo”) with Packman!
So my recommendation is to stick with Packman, as this provides more than just vlc.

VLC is not in non-oss, it is in the standard oss repo. This doesn’t contain the restricted codecs though (package vlc-codecs), so you should switch to Packman if you need them.

#13

…That’s not how you normally fix things in Linux, and it’s working now anyway, no?

It’s not unusual to see installation or upgrade instructions that first tell you to completely delete what you already have and start from scratch.

In VLC case we, the mortal users, have a recommendation to install it from Packman. Last post on the previous page, however, argued that VLC version that comes with Leap 42.1 in official repos is already good. I’m sure someone could say something in defense of dedicated VLC repo, too. I understand some other, critically important software can rely on components provided by VLC (phonon-backend or something?) but they can turn out to be buggy and need to be tabooed. Just last week Apper incessantly complained on all my computers that it couldn’t find a version of libmatroska6.so needed by vlc-no-x or something. I admit that I just reinstalled the darned thing to shut it up, took me less than five minutes.

It’s becoming too much, and I never use VLC to watch videos anyway, only as a streaming server for my webcam and only because I couldn’t be bothered to set up a dedicated server software. I haven’t tried on Leap yet but last two times I tried to watch VLC streams with VLC itself, either from my own or from friend’s computer, the video came out all garbled and unwatchable even though it looks perfectly fine in VLC on Windows or in my [S]mplayer and kaffeine or in browsers when embedded in a webpage. If this problem hasn’t gone away I’ll start a separate topic in multimedia forum but most of the time I don’t even remember I have an issue with VLC playback.

/rant

#14

VLC that comes from openSUSE works it just does not support proprietary formats. For that you need packman.

It is pretty simple openSUSE only ships open source stuff if you need proprietary stuff you need to get it else where in this case packman.

#15

All three packages are exactly the same.
But the official repo does not contain vlc-codecs for legal reasons.

The other difference is that the version in the official repo is not going to be updated (except for bug fixes if necessary), while Packman and VideoLAN always provide the latest version (taken from openSUSE Factory).

Actually it should just work to install vlc itself from the official repo, and only vlc-codecs from Packman. Only as long as the versions match though, at the moment both have 2.2.1, but Packman will get 2.2.2 (or 2.3.0 or whatever) when it is released.

I understand some other, critically important software can rely on components provided by VLC (phonon-backend or something?) but they can turn out to be buggy and need to be tabooed.

phonon-backend-vlc is not “critically important”, and is not even installed by default.
But yes, it happened on 13.2 that the version included does not work any more with the latest VLC (2.2.1), because it is built against VLC 2.1.x (which is included in 13.2). The only way to prevent this would be that Packman would provide phonon-backend-vlc too, built against their latest VLC version. They did for a while, but removed the package again.

By default, phonon-backend-gstreamer is used though.

Just last week Apper incessantly complained on all my computers that it couldn’t find a version of libmatroska6.so needed by vlc-no-x or something. I admit that I just reinstalled the darned thing to shut it up, took me less than five minutes.

libmatroska had a security update, and this caused the need for an updated VLC as well (VLC uses libmatroska). Packman updated the package a bit faster than the official update channel, but in both cases it was fixed within a day (VideoLAN took a few days longer, but VLC has been updated there as well meanwhile).

There was no need to reinstall, and it wouldn’t have helped anyway if the problem wouldn’t have been fixed already.